The recent Facebook Live streaming of four Chicago youth who appear to beat and torture a mentally-challenged teen is the latest in a growing number of violent acts captured on social media that threatens to desensitize the public, according to sociologists and media experts.

The fear: that this live-broadcast assault, which follows several like it, could encourage copycat acts.

For reasons researchers don't fully understand, social media interactions like Facebook and Twitter lower people's inhibitions. "People do and say things they often will not do in person," Subrahmanyam said.

The half-hour video, which exploded on social media Wednesday, appears to show at least one black man torturing and taunting the 18-year-old white victim – a special needs student – while making racial and disparaging remarks about President-elect Donald Trump. Four young African-Americans on Thursday were charged with hate crimes and other felonies for their involvement in the incident.

It wasn’t the first. Facebook Live has been used in a variety of recent incidents, including:

In June, terrorism suspect Larossi Abballa stabbed and killed a police captain and his partner in northern France in an Islamic State-inspired attack. He broadcast the aftermath of the attack on Facebook Live before he was killed by police.

A month later, Diamond Reynolds broadcast the bloody aftermath of the shooting death of her boyfriend, Philando Castile, via Facebook Live after he was shot by a Minnesota police officer. Facebook briefly removed the video but then put it back with a warning about its graphic nature. The broadcast spurred national media coverage of the incident.

In September, Earl Valentine critically injured his ex-wife and killed his son in North Carolina before livestreaming a confession on Facebook. He later committed suicide.

After the Castille incident, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg — who has made Live one of his pet projects —posted a note to his Facebook page, offering his sympathies to the affected families and voicing the benefit of capturing such acts on social media.

“While I hope we never have to see another video like Diamond's, it reminds us why coming together to build a more open and connected world is so important -- and how far we still have to go,” he wrote. Zuckerberg has not commented on the Chicago incident.

Facebook, which opened up its Live feature to the public last year, has been pushing its 1.8 billion users to try out the feature, rolling out an advertising campaign and featuring live streams in users' news feeds.

In a statement after the Chicago beating, the company said, "We do not allow people to celebrate or glorify crimes on Facebook and have removed the original video for this reason. In many instances, though, when people share this type of content, they are doing so to condemn violence or raise awareness about it. In that case, the video would be allowed."

The more such events play out on social media, the more viewers will be desensitized to them and more likelihood of “copycat” acts, said Jeremy Littau, an assistant professor of journalism and communication at Lehigh University who studies social media’s impact on society.

This image posted on the Chicago Police Department's Twitter page shows a frame from a video that was broadcast live on Facebook in which a man is assaulted.(Photo: AP)

Social media has been an overwhelmingly force for good in the world, from helping to organize protests in the Middle East to connecting friends around the globe, he said. But the advent of livestreaming on a mobile phone creates a powerful new medium that should be better regulated – by social media engineers and parents.

“As a society, we’re not doing a good enough of job of teaching our kids good social media behavior,” he said. “We have to figure out how to have a better conversation about what responsible behavior looks like.”

The video could also distract from the root causes of what would motivate four young people to commit such a heinous act, said Desmond Upton Patton, assistant professor of social work at Columbia University. Chicago tallied 762 murders and more than 4,300 shooting victims in 2016, more than New York and Los Angeles combined, creating certain neighborhoods already deeply habituated to violence.

“We’re jumping on the video,” Patton said. “But if we want to prevent these things from happening, we need to have a discussion about why they happen in the first place.”

Subrahmanyam, the CSULA psychologist, said Facebook and Twitter could step up efforts of flagging and removing violent content from their platforms, although sophisticated users quickly find ways around such barriers.

Live-streaming apps have rules about what you can stream and what you can't, but it's difficult for Facebook and Twitter to moderate the streams in real time.

The key, Subrahmanyam said, is increased digital literacy training. “With education and time, I do think we can combat these incidents,” she said.